Computer / Laptop Slow Performance

  Local Herefordshire IT services If you've searched "reliable computer repair" and you live in or around Hereford, the answer is closer than you think. Optimised Computing is a local, mobile computer and laptop repair service based in Hampton Bishop, Hereford, covering the whole of Herefordshire. We come to you, or you can drop your device off or arrange collection — whichever suits you best. Most online "best repair near me" guides list shops in London, Birmingham or Manchester and skip right over Herefordshire. This page fixes that. Below is a straightforward rundown of what reliable local repair looks like, what we fix, the areas we cover, and how to choose a trustworthy technician. Who we are Optimised Computing provides computer repairs, laptop repairs and Apple Mac repairs across Hereford and the wider Herefordshire area. We're a genuinely local service — not a national call centre — so when you get in touch you're dealing directly with the p...

Tuning your display Does your screen look washed out, like someone has turned the colour down? Is everything too dark, or so bright it's uncomfortable? Is text fuzzy around the edges no matter how much you squint? Before you blame your eyes — or rush out to buy a new monitor — the answer is almost always in the settings. Windows, your graphics card and the monitor itself all have controls that affect how the picture looks, and when one of them is set wrong, the whole display suffers. In this guide, we'll work through the fixes in the order we'd check them at Optimised Computing: the quick Windows checks first, then the built-in calibration tools, then the graphics card control panels from Nvidia, AMD and Intel, and finally the monitor itself. By the end you'll have a display tuned properly for your eyes — and you'll know the one hidden setting that causes most "washed out" complaints. First Things First: Native Resolution and Refresh Rate Before touc...

  Battery Health and Management Is your laptop not lasting as long as it used to on a single charge? Does it die unexpectedly even when the battery indicator shows 30%? You're not alone — and the good news is that Windows has some surprisingly powerful built-in tools to tell you exactly what's going on, no extra software required. In this guide, we'll cover three ways to check your laptop battery's true condition: the hidden powercfg battery report, the BIOS battery status, and the new battery health feature built into Windows 11. By the end, you'll know whether your battery needs a tweak, a setting change, or a replacement. Why Laptop Batteries Degrade Laptop batteries are lithium-ion cells, and like all lithium-ion batteries they have a finite number of charge cycles. A charge cycle is one full discharge and recharge — roughly speaking, using your laptop from full to empty and back again counts as one cycle. Most laptop batteries are rated for somewhere bet...

 Laptop CPU stuck on slow 0.4Ghz You plug your laptop in, fire it up, and everything feels like it's running through treacle. The charger's connected, the mains power is on, so why on earth is it so slow? You reinstall Windows, update every driver you can find, and it still crawls. A well-meaning friend tells you it's a software problem. But it isn't. Not even close. This is one of the most misunderstood faults I come across in laptop repair — and it's a perfect example of why knowing what's actually happening inside the machine matters. In this post I'm going to take you deeper than most IT blogs ever go, explaining the real chain of events that causes a laptop to throttle its own CPU when a battery fails — and what a proper diagnosis actually looks like. The Battery Isn't Just for Portability Most people think the battery in a laptop serves one purpose: letting you use it away from a power socket. That's true, but it's only half the story...

 Windows System Protection and Restore Points By Dave, Optimised Computin g — Mobile IT Support across Herefordshire You've probably heard the advice: "Make sure you back up your files!" But did you know Windows has a built-in safety net that's been quietly working in the background all along — one that can rescue a deleted or overwritten file in seconds, without needing an external drive? It's called Shadow Copy (or Volume Shadow Copy Service — VSS for short), and it's one of the most underused features in Windows. This post explains what it is, how it works, how to check it's switched on, and — crucially — how to control how many copies Windows keeps. What Is a Shadow Copy? A Shadow Copy is a snapshot of your files and folders at a specific point in time. Windows takes these snapshots automatically in the background, and they live quietly on your hard drive as part of the NTFS file system (the system Windows uses to organise everything on your...

Windows 10 End of Life: What Every Herefordshire Home User & Small Business Needs to Know Support ended October 2025. Millions of UK PCs are now unprotected. Here's what it means — and what you should do next. 👤 David Simmonds – Optimised Computing 📅 March 2026 ⏱ 8 min read 📍 Herefordshire, UK Still running Windows 10? Your PC is no longer receiving security updates. Microsoft ended all support for Windows 10 on 14th October 2025 . This means no more security patches — leaving your device increasingly vulnerable to viruses, ransomware, and data theft. If you've seen a message on your screen saying something about Windows 10 reaching end of life, or you've simply noticed Windows nudging you to upgrade — you're not imagining it. This is real, it's happening now, and it affects millions of people across the UK, including right here in Herefordshire. The good news? You have options. And most of them are m...